Most native tongues of the West are all but losthttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/most-native-tongues-of-the-west-are-all-but-lost
A map shows where just over 60 languages remain spoken around the region.

Click map to view larger

Last February, 103-year-old Hazel Simpson of Port Angeles, Washington, died. This was notable not only because of her age, but because she was the last Native speaker of Klallam, the language of the S’Klallam Tribe of the Olympic Peninsula.

The S’Klallams have worked hard over the last decade to revitalize their language, publishing a dictionary and starting a program to teach Klallam as a second language to schoolchildren on the Elwha Reservation. But something irreplaceable died along with Simpson, the last living person to learn Klallam at home and speak it as a primary language.

Like endangered species, languages are dying across the planet. By one estimate, one language vanishes every 14 days. At this rate, according to language researchers from the University of Hawaii, between half and 90 percent of the world’s 7,000 distinct languages will disappear by the end of the century –– a higher rate than the loss of the planet’s biodiversity. Of the 176 known languages once spoken in the U.S., 52 are thought to be dormant or extinct.

Languages die for complex reasons. But research suggests a combination of imperialism, economic development and mass urbanization, all of which tend to favor dominant national languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin and French. A recent study by an international group found a striking connection between economic growth and the disappearance of indigenous languages.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 370,000 Native-language speakers live in the United States, approximately 250,000 of them in the West. Of the roughly 70 Native languages still spoken in the region, Navajo is by far the healthiest, with more than 170,000 speakers.

Many languages, however, are down to their last speakers. Northern Paiute is one of dozens of Western tongues classified as “critically endangered.” Northern Paiute, also known as Paviotso, belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family of languages, once spoken by dozens of tribes from southern Mexico to Oregon.

Today, there are only three surviving native Paviotso speakers, all of whom live in Bridgeport, California, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Maziar Toosarvandani, a linguist from University of California, Santa Cruz, is working with these last speakers — two of them in their 90s — to build an online dictionary and a compendium of tribal stories.

Such efforts have proven invaluable. Toosarvandani points to the case of the Oklahoma-based Miami Tribe, where a scholar reconstructed the phonetics and grammar of this dormant language using 200 years of anthropological records. Today, the language is being taught to local schoolchildren through the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “There are examples of languages that have been extremely endangered or dormant, and that have been revitalized,” Toosarvandani said. “It’s possible. But you’ve got to have the documents to do it.”

A student copies Lakota words during a class at the Native American Community Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Brian Leddy

The Endangered Languages Project, an ambitious partnership between Google and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, not only collects troves of information about the world’s threatened languages but plots them on an interactive online map.

These initiatives will not preserve threatened tongues. The hope, however, remains that linguistic information can be saved in a sort of time capsule, awaiting future rebirth.

Don’t call Ted Schade a hero — definitely not an environmental one. Even though he’s largely responsible for the cleanup of cancer-causing dust from Southern California’s Owens Lake, something he accomplished by waging a decades-long David vs. Goliath battle against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — Schade will tell you: He is not a hero.

The director of the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District, a California agency, Schade views his legacy with an engineer’s practical logic. “I had a lawbreaker. I’m a law enforcement officer,” he says, rummaging in a desk drawer for the badge he confesses he has seldom worn.

A lean, mild-mannered man with thinning gray hair, Schade, 57, seems more like Mr. Rogers’ sidekick than an environmental warrior. He is polite and genteel, the product of a Catholic education. But the strength that helped him successfully challenge one of the nation’s most powerful municipal departments sparkles in his eyes: steely blue, penetrating and amused. “I like the fight,” he says.

Schade (pronounced “shady”) works from Suite 9, his office under the red-tiled roof of a former Bishop motel that serves as headquarters for the tiny air pollution district. On the wall is a mid-1800s map of the Owens Lake Mining District and a small pencil drawing of a snowy plover, the lake’s iconic bird. The miniature Japanese-inspired water fountain Schade built, complete with tiny bamboo spout, burbles.

“I’m a water guy, and this is the desert,” he explains with a shrug and quick smile.

For much of the last 24 years, he has haunted the dusty shores and crusty dry bottom of Owens Lake, monitoring air pollution. Schade loved the area from childhood visits, and, years later, on a whim, left a water-engineer job in San Diego County at twice the salary to join the air district. When he first heard of fugitive dust, he thought it sounded like something escaped prisoners left in their wake. But he soon learned that the ambient particles swirling over the basin were a major health hazard — and a violation of the federal Clean Air Act. Owens Lake is the largest single source of tiny particulate matter in the United States.

The 110-square-mile lakebed has been dry since 1926, 13 years after Los Angeles officials opened an aqueduct that diverted water 200 miles away to the young metropolis. The audacious water grab, memorialized in the 1974 movie Chinatown, turned the lake into a ghostly white alkali void. Winds sweeping down the Sierra Nevada kicked up a toxic brew of arsenic and other carcinogens, carrying it up to 50 miles and threatening the 40,000 residents of Owens Valley with asthma and emphysema — even heart attacks.

He made it his mission to improve air quality, experimenting with dust-abatement techniques that required the least amount of water: shallow flooding, gravel, saltgrass. He meticulously documented airborne particulates. And he kept poking around the lakebed and finding more pollution. By 1997, he was prepared to order Los Angeles to implement dust controls under federal clean air regulations.

“And then the fun began,” says Schade. L.A. balked; Schade persisted. L.A. sued. Courts backed the district. L.A. attacked. Schade increased monitoring. By 2013, the city was devoting 25 billion gallons of water annually and had spent more than $1.3 billion on dust abatement. That reduced dust by 90 percent — but it wasn’t enough.

Throughout the struggle, Schade remained committed to a fundamental principle: “Los Angeles has caused a problem. It has to clean up after itself.” He recounts the ensuing barrage of personal insults with obvious relish: empire builder, out-of-control regulator, zealot. “If they stopped calling me names, I’d know I was not doing my job.”

It did get ugly, says Pete Pumphrey, a retired attorney and president of Eastern Sierra Audubon. After each setback, Schade regrouped and returned to the battlefield. “He’s one of those people able to see the outcome and just keep working toward that vision.”

During Schade’s 24 years, three months and 20 days with the air district, Los Angeles went through five different Department of Water and Power managers. Through it all, Schade stuck to his tactic of “making agreeing agreeable because the alternative is so bad.”

It finally worked. When Eric Garcetti became mayor of Los Angeles in 2013, he brought in new managers who were interested in solutions, not unending combat. “They knew a lousy legal strategy when they saw one,” Schade says. Meanwhile, Schade and the air district had finalized tests of a new waterless dust-abatement method. Late last year, the city agreed to control the dust on up to 53.4 square miles of lakebed, using enormous bulldozers to dig deep furrows that capture and retain the loose dust. The agreement promises clean air for Owens Valley and allows Los Angeles to save 3 billion gallons of water annually — a classic win-win.

In a press release touting the settlement, Mayor Garcetti described Schade as “a truly great environmentalist.” Of all the names he has been called over the years, this is the most surprising one and, considering the many past insults, it’s from the office Schade least expected. “It’s ironic,” he says, with a rare full-on grin. “I guess I finally got through.”

]]>No publisherCommunitiesCaliforniaWaterPollutionNot on homepage2015/03/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleCommunity solar comes of age in the Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/community-solar-comes-of-age-in-the-west
A neighborhood solar experiment in Washington gains traction in other states.Nancy Lillquist was never optimistic that solar panels would work on her roof in Ellensburg, Washington, a college town on the Cascade Mountains’ dry eastern slope. The neighborhood’s big conifers blocked the sun. As a city council member, she noted the irony: Even as she and her fellow council members advocated for solar, they were also encouraging planting more trees for shade.

Then Lillquist found another option: In 2006, she invested $1,000 in a solar-powered renewable energy park the city’s utility had just built. The project, which would grow to 109 kilowatts over the coming years — enough to power a dozen homes — occupied open city-owned ground near soccer and baseball fields. Lillquist’s contribution paid for about one solar panel in the facility, whose output would earn her and about 100 other residents a credit on their utility bills.

When the Renewable Park came online, it was by many accounts the birth of “community solar.” The concept addresses a basic problem: While many homeowners support clean energy, the majority of residential rooftops lack sufficient solar exposure. Renters usually can’t install solar panels, no matter how sunny their rooftops, and some homeowners simply can’t afford them.

Ellensburg’s idealistic experiment cost more than $1 million to complete. And because the city bought in just before solar began a steep price drop, its solar electricity costs seven times more than the cheap local hydropower. Subscribers like Lillquist will probably never recoup their investments. Nevertheless, she says, “it feels good to make energy locally.”

“People were coming from all over the country to look at the project,” she says. Other cities followed Ellensburg’s lead. Municipal utilities in Ashland, Oregon, and St. George, Utah, soon created those states’ only community solar arrays. In 2007, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District filled its 1-megawatt community solar program — roughly nine times larger than Ellensburg’s — with 600 subscribers. More than 20 other Western utilities have since adopted shared solar, some with projects many times the size of Ellensburg’s.

Spurred by dramatically lower solar panel prices and rising demand, community solar “has reached a tipping point,” according to Becky Campbell, a senior researcher at the Solar Electric Power Association. That means solar energy is on the cusp of being available to everyone. But it also means that Ellensburg’s ideals are feeling the strain of going mainstream.

Nancy Lillquist at the Ellensburg, Washington, Renewable Park. Even though she paid a steep price as an early supporter of community solar, she’s still a big fan.

Katrinka Kalarchik

Community solar hasn’t had an easy path forward. Most people are served by for-profit, “investor-owned” utilities, which are accountable foremost to their shareholders and are heavily regulated by states. In those utilities’ territories, community solar frequently encounters “regulatory underbrush,” says Joseph Wiedman, a solar law expert representing the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council.

Some of that underbrush involves “net metering.” Forty-three states require investor-owned utilities to reimburse customers with solar on their property for the electricity they supply to the grid. But in most states those policies don’t apply to customers who fractionally invest in a community solar project. Some community solar organizers have instead tried to distribute the returns to their investors as cash — an approach that turns their projects into profit-seeking ventures and exposes them to securities laws. These projects have to register with state or federal authorities — a process that can cost anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million — or else apply for complicated exemptions that often require costly help from lawyers and accountants.

Even states that encourage community solar have problems. Linda Irvine and 35 residents of Whidbey Island, Washington, scraped together $430,000 to build a 50kW solar array near a community garden in 2011, selling the energy to the local utility and collecting a 2009 state incentive for community solar. But navigating tax laws and getting exemptions from securities laws made the whole experience “a bit overwhelming,” Irvine says.

The city of Portland, backed by the U.S. Energy Department, tried to build 80kW of shared solar in 2011, but the effort bogged down in state securities laws and other financing hurdles. Andria Jacob, who oversaw the project for the city, says: “You come up against too many barriers.”

A solar array at Taos Academy Charter School was one of New Mexico’s first community solar projects.

Courtesy Sol Luna Solar

By 2010, the price of solar panels was less than half of what it was in 2006, and consumer interest was growing. Community solar was poised to become a big business — if only someone could bring an easy, replicable model to utilities that might not otherwise take the initiative.

A company called Clean Energy Collective, founded in 2010, approached the local electric cooperative in rural northwestern Colorado and proposed a community solar project. Electric co-ops, like municipal utilities, have regulatory autonomy and a mandate to serve their members, and Clean Energy Collective made the utility an offer it couldn’t refuse: The company would build the project, assume the financial risk, even calculate the bill credits, as long as the utility agreed to buy the electricity and distribute the credits on customers’ bills.

Clean Energy Collective learned to navigate securities laws and claim federal tax credits, and built a 78kW solar array near the local wastewater treatment plant. The project turned a profit. Clean Energy Collective went on to partner with more rural co-ops, including one in New Mexico, where it created that state’s first community solar project for a Taos school in 2012.

It got a boost when a Colorado law, the “Community Solar Gardens Act,” cleared state regulators. The law, first passed in 2010, requires investor-owned utilities, including Colorado’s major utility, Xcel Energy, to build 6MW of community solar per year into their already existing state renewable mandate of 30 percent by 2020. It was the first legislation in the country to establish clear policies for how community solar should work. Between 2012 and 2015, Clean Energy Collective constructed 11 projects hooked to Xcel’s grid, most around 500kW in size — roughly five times bigger than Ellensburg’s Renewable Park. Colorado now leads the nation in community-owned solar, and 75 percent of the state’s electricity customers have access to a project.

That’s made Colorado into a model for other states. Passing laws like the Community Solar Gardens Act is probably the most direct way to expand community solar, says Wiedman.

But that’s “a pretty heavy lift,” he adds. Investor-owned utilities often resist, lobbying hard. In 2012, for example, California’s two biggest utilities crushed a bill that would require utilities to fold up to 2,000MW of shared solar into their renewable energy requirements. Advocates pushed through a more modest bill in 2013, paving the way for up to 600MW of shared solar in California by 2019.

Now, even investor-owned utilities are joining the community solar game, albeit on their own terms. “A lot of it is purely economics,” explains Jason Coughlin, a financial analyst for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Ellensburg’s Renewable Park cost more than $9 per watt, while today the installed cost of solar — solar-panel cost plus construction and permitting — has dropped to less than $3 per watt.

“Utilities feel a lot more comfortable with (community solar) now,” says Solar Electric Power Association’s Campbell, who’s working with more than 50 utilities now considering new programs.

Susannah Churchill, a policy director for the nonprofit advocacy group Vote Solar, says big utilities are also getting smarter. “(They’re) seeing that people want the ability to decide where their energy comes from,” she says. Unlike an individual homeowner’s rooftop solar, shared solar, if managed by the utility, lets the utility be the middleman and turn a profit.

Even Pacific Gas and Electric, one of California’s big three investor-owned utilities, proposed a community solar program while it fought the state’s shared solar law. To Churchill, the proposal was little more than another green power program, in which customers would pay a premium for generic solar energy from utility-solicited projects. PG&E continued to push that model as California’s Public Utilities Commission considered rules to implement the state’s 600MW of new shared solar, but Churchill and others pressed for options that would favor smaller and more local projects.

In January, California regulators issued a split decision: Utilities will be allowed to sell power from their shared solar projects, but they’re also now required to buy electricity from third-party developers like Clean Energy Collective that could site projects locally on brownfields or schools. The decision is “a really important moment” for shared solar as it expands across the country, Churchill says.

It’s also a nod to community solar’s hardscrabble roots in Ellensburg. After all, it was there that the ideal of not just clean, but local, energy took off in the first place.

]]>No publisherRenewable EnergySolar EnergyCommunitiesEnergy & Industry2015/03/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleChainsaw diplomacy http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.3/chainsaw-diplomacy
In southern Utah’s Escalante watershed, a river restoration group tries to cut through old cultural barriers.The Escalante River is like a tree with its trunk in the Colorado River at Lake Powell and its branches reaching up to the top of the Aquarius Plateau. There’s an elevation gain of 7,000 vertical feet, and it’s all sandstone, a waterslide.

There are two small towns in the watershed, with a combined population of less than 1,200 people. The villages, Escalante and Boulder, are extremely remote by U.S. standards. This area was the last part of the Lower 48 to be mapped by the federal government, in 1875. Today, the closest well-stocked grocery store is more than 100 miles away over winding mountain roads.

The people who live in the two towns are mainly Mormon — members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — descendants of the original pioneers who first arrived in the early 1880s. But there are also newcomers, maybe 25 percent of the current population, who’ve moved here from “outside” because of the area’s natural beauty.

The insiders and the outsiders sometimes do not get along, especially on issues concerning land use and resource management. The most dramatic rift opened up in 1996, when then-President Bill Clinton created the 1.9 million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, covering a good part of the watershed. Outsiders welcomed it; insiders were, and many still are, furious. I have a theory about the conflict. I think it’s because the two groups have entirely different cosmologies, or answers to the questions of where we come from, why we are here, and where we are going.

Summer in the Escalante Valley, where a traditional Mormon ranch culture includes the summer parade

Ace Kvale

Summer in the Escalante Valley, where a traditional Mormon ranch culture includes the summer rodeo.

Ace Kvale

Mormons believe we are the offspring of a Heavenly Father who put us here, in this mortal existence on the planet Earth, in order to progress toward a higher, even god-like state of being. They believe they, the Saints of the Latter Days, are chosen by God to build His Kingdom on Earth and prepare for the return of His son, Jesus the Christ, and that God promised this land to them for just this purpose. The Mormons’ belief system is based upon this faith. It’s how they see themselves, as God’s stewards of the land.

The cosmology of the outsiders, on the other hand, is not based in faith but in reason. They believe human beings evolved from ape-like ancestors, for example, and that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. Their god is nature, and they use science to understand His work, or Her work, if they believe in a god at all. They’re environmentalists.

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Both cultures are almost entirely white Americans. There are rich and poor on both sides. They speak the same language, but many of the words have different meanings. The word “cow,” for instance, is a symbol of prosperity to the Mormons, but for environmentalists “cow” is a symbol of environmental destruction. And when it comes to talking about water and how to manage the watershed, the “simple logic” that Powell spoke of is something that’s very difficult to achieve.

Sue Fearon works every day to try to bring people in Escalante and Boulder together around their common watershed issues. She grew up in Connecticut but has lived on Deer Creek, eight miles east of Boulder, for nearly 30 years –– first in a small camper without plumbing or electricity, but now in a home carved out of the inside of an 80-foot-tall sandstone mound. She grows a lot of her own food, has a few beef and dairy cows, pigs, turkeys, some horses. She and her husband, Grant Johnson, want to be as self-sufficient as possible.

This morning, we are in Sue’s pickup, driving from Boulder to Escalante across the Hogback, a narrow winding ridgeline that drops off on both sides for several hundred feet. Sue’s rather petite and she’s sitting up tall with both hands on the wheel, paying close attention to our course.

“I’m a farmer,” she says, “so to me it’s all about productivity.”

“What is?” I ask.

“The water,” she says. “We can let it slide off the mountain and end up in Los Angeles. God knows they need it there. But I think we should use it here in ways that increase productivity, so we can be more self-sufficient as a community.”

A creek, tributary to the Escalante, runs through private property that was cleared of Russian olives through one of the programs under the ERWP umbrella.

Ace Kvale

She’s part of a group called the Escalante River Watershed Partnership, comprised of residents and representatives from government agencies and environmental groups who hope to figure out ways to restore the riparian areas in the Escalante watershed. Riparian areas slow down the water as it slides off the mountain. They have native plants and grasses, which helps the soil function as a sponge, absorbing and holding the water so that other plants and animals can use it. The partnership focuses on riparian zones because many of these areas in the Escalante watershed are in need of attention and effort.

It’s complicated. Some riparian areas are on public property, some are on private property. On public property there are long lists of regulations and procedures, on private property the owner can do pretty much whatever he or she likes. Some riparian areas have been damaged by overgrazing, many have been invaded by Russian olives, and up high in the mountains the beaver have been largely wiped out. Beaver are very good at slowing water down, but some people don’t like them because they clog irrigation pipes.

Sue says the partnership, or ERWP (pronounced “er-whip”), has had some productive meetings and designed projects they’re carrying out, mainly controlling the invasive Russian olives, but there’s a big problem in that, for the most part, the insiders are not participating.

“They won’t come to our meetings,” she says. “When they hear about ERWP they think ‘environmentalists’ and ‘federal government,’ and they’re afraid we’re trying to take away their grazing rights. But we’re not. We’re not trying to get rid of cows. We’re just trying to restore the riparian areas, and we’re using science to guide our work. We’re trying to bring back the grass that cows can eat. But they don’t want to talk to us.”

One of Sue’s jobs with ERWP is to eradicate Russian olives on private land. Russian olives were introduced into the Escalante watershed in the 1950s and have pretty much taken over in recent decades, clogging the shores along the streams in a way that turns the stream into something like a canal or pipeline, so that all the water runs away except for what the trees soak up. Sue has funding to pay crews to come in and get rid of them, at no cost to the landowner.

Click map to enlarge.

Eric Baker

“I meet with the landowners and ask them what they want from their land,” she says. “I ask them what they see in their minds as a best-case scenario. ‘Do you want your stream beds choked with Russian olives so no cows or other animals can get down there? Do you want to not be able to ride a horse along the river?’ Some people like Russian olives because wild turkeys live in them and they love wild turkeys. So I can’t help them, and that’s OK. I can’t force anyone to do something they don’t want to do, because none of this is going to work unless the landowners take a stake in it. If they don’t want to go into it as partners, then it won’t work.”

“And how’s it going?” I ask.

She says that while things improved over the last year, it hasn’t always gone well, at least with some of the locals.

“It’s hard to form partnerships here because I’m an outsider,” she says. “They don’t know who I am, and they’re not used to having someone knock on their door and say, ‘Let’s talk about those Russian olive trees down on your creek.’ ”

I tell her my theory of the two cultures, the two cosmologies and how the two sides see everything differently and there’s not much getting around it.

She’s not impressed. She’s not going to accept a theory that ends with no possibility of change.

“It’s one river system that runs through this whole area,” she says. “If we act collectively, we can end up with a productive and sustainable community. But if things stay the same, then everybody ends up working independently and the river is cut up in parts, where people act like what they do doesn’t impact everybody else. But that’s not possible, because we’re all in the same watershed.”

Dell LeFevre, longtime Escalante Valley rancher.

Ace Kvale

So I call Dell LeFevre, one of the few remaining local ranchers, bishop of the Boulder LDS and ward, current county commissioner, a strong political force in the area. I’ve interviewed him before, but he doesn’t remember me, says he gets interviewed too often.

He’s on his cellphone, driving a semi with a load of hay from Panguitch back to his ranch in Boulder. He says he’ll meet me at the Frosty Freeze in Escalante.

It’s a calm autumn afternoon, the late sunlight on leaves just beginning to turn. We sit at a picnic table next to the sidewalk. Dell’s 75 years old, currently in remission from stage-4 cancer, but still looks and talks a lot like actor Slim Pickens, who played Major “King” Kong, the bomber pilot, in Dr. Strangelove. He and his wife have adopted and raised 14 kids, all from developing countries. He knows I’m the enemy, the liberal media, but he’s the man, the go-to guy in this part of Garfield County, and he’s going to tell it like it is.

“How can I help you?” he asks. “What is it you want to know?”

“So there’s this new citizen’s group, ERWP, that’s trying to restore the watershed, but apparently the locals are not coming to their meetings. I’m wondering if it’s true. When we met before, you said there was a war going on between ‘the Hitlers and the Jews,’ and you were the Jews and the government and the environmentalists were the Hitlers. Is the war still going on?”

“The truth is, we’ve lost,” he says. “They’re going to get us one way or another. They want to shut down the grazing on public land.”

“But,” I say, “ERWP’s not trying to stop grazing. They’re just trying to cut down Russian olives and bring back the grass.”

Then, for some reason, LeFevre is telling me about his service during the Vietnam War, when he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands and spying on the Russians. Then he got injured and was sent to a hospital in San Francisco, where part of his recuperation involved “rolling hippies in the park.” That was back when he liked to drink beer. He speaks of it fondly.

LeFevre’s smart as a whip, funny and kind of charming. He tells me a story about a woman in his ward who came to him for church assistance, money to pay the bills, and he told her it would be no problem but he’d like her to sweep the church once a week, and she told him he wasn’t a real bishop at all.

“I said, ‘Ma’am, you know that and I know that, but apparently God does not.’ ”

“But what about the ERWP people?” I ask. “Why don’t you go to their meetings?”

And he says, “They’re the ones who shot our cows, cut our fences and burned our line cabins. You’re talking to someone who’s a bit bitter.”

“When did that happen?”

“Back in the ’90s,” he says.

Actually, the cows, the fences and the line cabins belonged to Dell’s father-in-law. The family later sold the grazing permit to the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental organization interested in restoring the riparian areas along the Escalante River by removing the cattle. LeFevre, along with Garfield County and other ranchers, then sued the Trust, claiming it was illegal to buy a grazing permit and not use it for grazing. The Trust fended off this and other challenges by keeping a smaller number of cows on some of the grazing allotments it had purchased.

“My thing is,” LeFevre says, “the group that’s doing this, some of them are the ones that had the most say in getting us off the river.”

I’m pretty sure this is just not true and he’s saying it for effect, somewhat inflammatorily.

“Who do you think did it?” I ask.

“I think it was someone from the federal government,” he says.

“Does it bother you they base everything in science?” I ask, trying to test my theory.

“I don’t believe a lot of science,” he says. “Like climate change. The earth may be getting warmer, but things change all the time. You have to go with it.”

“And if it’s getting warmer now it’s because God wants it this way?”

“That’s right,” he says.

Over at the next picnic table splotches of sunlight through the trees are flickering on the faces of three blonde siblings, all under 5 years old, each holding ice cream cones like fish between their hands.

Volunteers at the organic farm connected to the Hells Backbone Cafe, a favorite of travelers and newcomers to the valley.

Ace Kvale

Volunteers at the organic farm connected to the Hells Backbone Cafe, a favorite of travelers and newcomers to the valley.

Ace Kvale

Dennis Bramble is a biologist, retired from the University of Utah. He used to study evolutionary morphology. Now he studies grass in the Upper Valley.

“I prefer to call it rangeland science,” he says.

He lives in Escalante but owns 160 acres of what used to be rangeland for cattle in the Upper Valley. We’re going there now in his pickup truck, 15 miles west of town.

“The riparian areas along the streams in this watershed used to be thick with grasses, more than 40 different species,” he says. “But the land was severely overgrazed and the grass, in a lot of areas, is gone now. I’ve been experimenting on my land to see what it takes for the grass to come back.”

Bramble has white hair and wears glasses that are a little crooked. He’s a member of ERWP and he goes to the meetings. He’s tall and thin and soft-spoken, quiet or listening most of the time. He hands me a book that’s been riding on the seat between us. It’s a master’s thesis from 1954, hardbound in leather, a hand-typed carbon copy of the original: The Impact of Man on the Vegetation and Soil of the Upper Valley Allotment, Garfield County, Utah. It might be the only copy in existence; Bramble found it at the University of Utah library.

“I’ll show you my land today, but I think you should read this book and then we’ll come back and it will make a lot more sense.”

The thesis is a scientific report written by an insider, Heber H. Hall from Boulder, Utah, now deceased. It presents a history of grazing on the very land that Bramble now owns and includes testimony from original pioneers who admit that they destroyed many of the grassland areas in the watershed by overgrazing.

According to the first-hand accounts, when the Mormon pioneers first came to the Escalante Valley in the early 1880s, the grass along the streams was so high that herds of sheep would disappear in it. The riparian areas were lush and diverse in species, like veins of living gold the pioneers mined with livestock. They brought in 60,000 sheep and 20,000 cows, and within two decades the grass was gone.

Grass helps the soil to function as a sponge in a variety of ways, especially by intercepting water that would otherwise run freely off the land and helping it to, instead, infiltrate the soil where it is then actually stored. If the grass dies, the sponge dries up. Then, if there’s a flood, the water becomes a knife that cuts the sponge in half, leaving a gap, or arroyo, in between. Now the stream is suddenly five or 10 or 40 feet lower than it used to be. There’s no more water on top, and the only plants that can grow in the arid soil are sagebrush and rabbitbush, neither of which are eaten by cows. This is what happened to many streams in the Escalante watershed.

Hall writes:

“These pioneers, obsessed with misconceived ideas of unlimited abundance of forage for their livestock and water for their arable land, did not perceive that these lands and their products could be destroyed. Their main interest was to reap the harvest that Nature had planted for them without considering what effect the increasing number of sheep and cattle would eventually have upon this harvest. … The initial floods, devastating and uncontrollable, descended upon their privately owned land, ripped open irrigation canals, destroyed dams, trenched and deposited debris on the cultivated fields, rendering them sterile. … Such early destruction to the land was believed, by these early settlers, to be acts of God, punishing them for moral sins committed.”

By 1920, the number of cows and sheep in the watershed had dropped by half. By 1950, according to Hall, livestock productivity had dropped to 10 percent of what it was in the beginning, and nearly 20 percent of the people in Escalante were on government or church relief.

“Little comfort can be found in the fact that the same generation that brought such catastrophe to this once fertile valley lived to reap the poverty of their folly.”

Hall’s tone in his summation is a little caustic, and I wonder if maybe he had something of an ax to grind with his family and friends back in Boulder. Then I run into Dell LeFevre again and I show him the book and he explains what happened.

“Heber was my uncle, and I buried his brother today,” he says as he paws the pages. “But he couldn’t have written this because he couldn’t spell any better than I do.” He hands it back to me.

“In the acknowledgements,” I say, “Hall thanks his wife for proofreading and typing the manuscript, so maybe she helped him with the spelling.”

LeFevre tells me that Heber went away to the Second World War and never really came back. He wound up in Salt Lake City and went to the University of Utah to study science. He became an environmentalist.

“We lost him,” LeFevre says.

A Utah Conservation Corps member wields a chainsaw during training with the Escalante River Watershed Partnership, in a program to remove invasive Russian olive trees.

Jacob W. Frank/Courtesy The Corps Network

I go back to the Upper Valley with Dennis Bramble and we sit in his truck on the 200-foot-long bridge over the arroyo that cuts through the bottom of the valley.

“According to Hall,” Bramble says, “this valley used to be a flat, grassy meadow, and the bridge over the creek was only five feet wide. Now the stream is 30 feet below us. The water table has dropped to there and the banks of the stream are covered with sagebrush and rabbitbush. No grass, no willows or cottonwoods. This is the place Hall was describing in his book.”

As an experiment, Bramble has built two exclosures on his land, just above the arroyo. An exclosure is a fenced-off area designed to keep cows out, not in. Deer and elk can easily get inside by jumping the fences, but Bramble says they rarely do. Small native grazers (rabbits and voles) have free access to the vegetation inside the exclosures.

We walk inside one of the exclosures and it’s obvious that there’s a lot more grass, and a lot more kinds of grasses, inside the fence.

“We only graze inside the fence in the fall,” he says. “In September, maybe October. The idea was to see what will happen if we reduce grazing pressure and the season.”

A Youth Corps volunteer stands near the river bottom of the Escalante River, where environmental groups and government agencies have been working to remove invasive Russian olive trees and restore the free-flowing river.

Chris Crisman for The Nature Conservancy

He’s walking around, bending over, looking closely at the different kinds of grasses.

“Here’s some thick spike wheatgrass. … That one’s blue gramma…some needle-and-thread here. That’s Indian rice grass over there. These are native species, but they weren’t here before we put up the fence and reduced the grazing pressure. They came back on their own. We’ve quadrupled the number of grass species without planting anything.”

In between the patches of grass there are clumps of dead rabbitbush. The rabbitbush on the outside of the fence are doing fine, very healthy. But the rabbitbush on the inside is dying.

“Are you killing the rabbitbush on purpose?” I ask.

“I’m not killing them,” he says. “The voles are killing them.”

“Voles?”

“They’re relatives of lemmings, meadow mice. They eat the same things as cows and sheep. They like grassy, open, sunny places. They were living down by the creek where it’s more moist, but when we changed the grazing to the fall, they moved up here. The problem with grazing in the early summer is the grasses don’t get high enough or dense enough, the ground stays too hot and dry for voles. They’re out-competed by cows. But if we keep the cows off until fall, the grass gets big and the ground stays moist and the voles come in, and then in the winter they eat the bark and roots of the rabbitbush, killing them, making more area for grass. I think voles are the major driver in restoring the meadows, and they do it by killing their competitors, the rabbitbush.”

“Have you explained your results to the local ranchers?” I ask.

“I don’t think they’re going to listen to me,” he says. “I’d be asking them to change their grazing practices, and there’s just too much inertia in the present system. They seem fearful of change.”

“Yes,” I say, “that may be true, but mainly I think it’s because you’re a scientist, and you’re not from around here.” I’d been told as much by more than one insider — they admit scientists are smart, but they don’t trust them.

Later, Bramble says that he disagrees with this characterization. Both Heber H. Hall and his mentor at the University of Utah, Walter P. Cottam, were members of the LDS Church, and both were conservationists.

“Cottam was a distinguished professor of botany,” Brambles says, “the first person of prominence to openly call public attention to the severe problems created by the chronic overgrazing of Utah’s public lands, and a co-founder of The Nature Conservancy. These individuals and others demonstrate that progressively oriented persons do occur in these communities, although they are uncommon. The factors that seem most influential in opening the minds of such individuals are exposure to the outside world and, especially, education.”

He thinks my theory about the underlying problem of different cosmologies is both shallow and wrong, and worse still it tends to “further poison the well in ways that will make meaningful dialogue within the community even less likely.

“It’s not the religion per se,” he says, “but rather the long-term cultural, political and economic isolation of these communities that is most responsible for the standoffs between insiders and outsiders in places like Escalante.”

A sign of the newer valley residents: A cairn sits atop Sugarloaf Mountain in Boulder, Utah, surrounded by poems and other offerings and flying various flags — anything from the American flag that’s there now to prayer flags to a gay pride flag to this Jolly Roger.

Ace Kvale

Link Chynoweth, bishop of Escalante’s Second Ward, is a third-generation farmer and rancher. We sit in his living room looking out the windows at the church property he manages, growing high-quality hay for horses. He’s a calm man, thinks before he speaks.

“I feel they don’t understand us,” he says. “Like, I went to a Monument Advisory Committee meeting here in Escalante in the spring, and when they opened it up for public comment all the Great Old Broads for Wilderness spoke against cattle grazing on public land. When it was my turn, I said, ‘You all speak like we’re here to make a quick buck and rape the land, and I’m here to tell you that’s not the way it is. Everybody agrees this area was overgrazed in the past. Where there were thousands of cows, now there are dozens. But I’m a conservationist, I’m not here to destroy the environment. My family’s had the permit on Cottonwood Wash for three generations. We take care of it, and I want my grandkids to care of it, too.’ ”

I confess to him, the bishop, that I’ve been wondering if there’s a way for the two sides to talk to each other, but I’ve failed to come up with anything.

“I don’t think it can happen,” he says. “So many people on my side, we don’t want to sit down with them. We’d rather stay away from them. I don’t think that’s the right approach –– we need to give input and there should be dialogue –– but do I think there will be? No. There’s too much suspicion and distrust on both sides.

“My main focus,” he says, “is to live a good life centered on my religious beliefs. For me, the way I see it, the earth and the environment are based in the biblical story of creation –– God created the earth for man, and man is the steward over the land. But, for them, God is the earth, God is the environment.”

“Yes, exactly,” I say.

“So that means you can’t do anything that threatens or damages the earth or the environment. What I don’t understand is, just the fact that you live on the earth damages it. I mean, if you’re going to take the cows off the monument then why not put up a sign that says ‘No humans past this point’?”

“So you’re not going to go to the ERWP meetings?” I ask.

“Well, they don’t come to ours either,” he says.

I go back to Sue Fearon and tell her what I’ve been hearing from the locals, not just Dell LeFevre and Link Chynoweth, but others who were even less diplomatic. I tell her it seems like there really is a cultural gap that has to do with different ways of answering the questions of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. She says I don’t know enough about the day-to-day interactions between people who live and work together down there. Fearon, for example, is the clerk for the local soil conservation district, a decidedly “insider” organization. She hunts with insiders. She even shows up, uninvited, at what she calls “the Old Man’s Club” –– retired locals who meet for breakfast in a local restaurant.

“I used to see just the differences, but now I see a lot more common ground,” she says. “The common parts are not rooted in religion, or the political stance of the politicians, or us and them. Those are the differences, the shit you have to scrape off to get the point: We’re all in this watershed, it has meaning to us as individuals, and therein lies the common ground. The difference is not about truth, it’s about perspective. I do this all the time with people in southern Utah –– we agree to disagree and then move on and, generally, have productive and respectful relationships.”

Sue’s right. I don’t live down here and perhaps it’s wrong for me to impose my theory on a cultural environment in which I am really the “outsider.” They’re going to have to figure it out for themselves. The Escalante River Watershed Partnership is an attempt to work through the problems. They’re trying to bring everybody together around the same table to find what John Wesley Powell called the “simple logic” of the community. I wish them the best of luck.

The Escalante River from high above Scorpion Gulch in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

Ace Kvale

Scott Carrier is a writer and documentarian based in Salt Lake City; his books include Running After Antelope, published in 2001, and his radio pieces have been aired on radio shows including Hearing Voices, This American Life and All Things Considered.

This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.

]]>No publisherEssaysUtahPublic LandsPoliticsCommunitiesBureau of Land Management2015/02/16 03:10:00 GMT-7ArticleMy kind of town: Livingston, Montanahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.3/my-kind-of-town-livingston-montana
An essay on returning home to the West, after years abroad.

Livingston, Montana, on the Fourth of July.

Jake Luttinger

When the preacher said doctrine wouldn’t allow my sister to join the Girl Scouts, he learned something about my mother, who turned around, shut the door and just walked away. Every time I walk past that church, I remember why I so rarely tried to tell my mother what to do.

A busy supermarket stands just up the street. There used to be a root beer stand there, and the thought of it churns memories of my grandmother, generally a soft touch for a frosty mug.

Around the corner is the tiny house Mom rented when we first moved into town, after her divorce, right across the street from the school where they told her women teachers weren’t worth as much as men. That policy turned her into a lifelong union member. Like I said, there wasn’t much point in trying to tell her no.

On the other end of town, I often pass the house where I got my –– astonishing –– first real kiss. The taste of lips and the texture of tongue can sound pretty sour to the early adolescent mind, but Debby Sanders converted me.

When John Lennon died a few years later, I was sitting in a house on the corner of F and Geyser, watching TV with the sound off and the stereo turned up. It took a couple minutes for the reality to soak through the fog.

These are the kind of ghosts I find on my daily walks around Livingston, Montana, my hometown.

For a place with only about 7,000 people, Livingston is pretty well known. Celebrities hang around and the scenery astounds. Three mountain ranges bulk up here and millions of tourists pass through, usually on their way to Yellowstone Park, just up the road. The Yellowstone River shoulders by, mostly a delight and sometimes a menace but always a marvel, untamed in spite of us. We’ve got wildlife all over the place and we have our famous wind, with gusts that roll semi trailers and motor homes, and once even a train, out by the truck stop. Serious crime is rare, but we live in the world: In 2011, two sheriff’s deputies killed a man who had shot and wounded a woman multiple times.

A Google dump could tell you most of this. But it can’t tell you who we are. That’s what the ghosts are for, if you listen to them.

I’ve spent most of my life here, so I see these ghosts a lot. They don’t pull at me, or make me particularly sad or happy. They just exist, like gravity, issuing reminders and providing weight.

It wasn’t always like this. They used to scare the bejeebers out of me.

A generation ago, I returned to Livingston after a long stint of foreign adventures –– the swarm of Asian cities, body-surfing in New Zealand, learning that a chicken’s monetary value soars if you run it over with a motorcycle.

The concept of coming home started to percolate in Seoul, Korea, on a sunny afternoon when a little bird flitted over my head, and I hit the deck. There had been riots and I thought somebody was aiming a stone at me. Slogging through tear gas makes a vivid memory, but what really struck me, after I regained my feet, was the rarity of birds in that city.

Back home, the tables turned and the stories sought me, popping up everywhere. I didn’t know that familiarity could frighten so.

It took a while to come home for good, partly because when I got here, the ghosts rattled me, made my feet itch to leave again. They were everywhere, peeking around corners, lifting a curtain to watch me pass, telling their stories. Mrs. Working was a crabby woman, impossible­ to satisfy, while her neighbor, Mr. Hokanson, could always spare a minute for a kid. A giant boy named Phillip sat next to me in second grade; he couldn’t speak a word, but a shared crayon always made him smile. (He liked the red ones.) Leo Schaeffer had 11 kids of his own but loved engaging in apple fights with the neighborhood hooligans. Willie Moffett, handsome and impish, joined the Marine Corps, and I never saw him again. Perry Herbst disappeared, too. By the time Kenny Fleming died, he didn’t add much weight at all to the first coffin I ever carried. I have no idea what happened to Debby Sanders, she of that first kiss.

I thought the best stories lay in unknown and exotic places, so that’s where I sought them. Back home, the tables turned and the stories sought me, popping up everywhere. I didn’t know that familiarity could frighten so.

It took a while, but I learned to appreciate the stories. They were part of me. Midge Taylor’s good advice at her cluttered table still provides a flicker of warmth when I pass her house. Mickey Livermore’s giant fist taught me to watch my mouth. The bowling alley where I played pinball is now a mental health center.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m fully capable of ignoring these ghosts, especially if I’m in a hurry or preoccupied. Most people have similar memories, I suspect. But most people don’t live in the town where they grew up, so their ghosts suffer the erosion of time and distance.

My ghosts don’t seem to fade, especially since I’ve been walking more, trying to wrestle back the middle-aged flab. They’ve taught me to see their stories as a yardstick, a measurement of how things change.

On M Street, I remember how the kids ostracized Dolly McNeill, and I wonder if modern schools could have nipped that in the bud. On Yellowstone Street, I recall the crush I had on Jill Glenn, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Up by Winans School, I remember the satisfaction I felt when Benjie Schweniger knocked the snot out of the worst bully in junior high school. On Eighth Street, I remember the woman they called Dirty Mary, who raided garbage cans for food and suffered endless taunts. We didn’t have a mental health center then, or a food bank either, though we probably needed both.

On some blocks, I can name somebody who lived in every house at some point in time. But I often can’t name the people who live there now. I wonder: Do they know the stories of their homes?

A great scary, hairy man used to drink beer on his porch on the corner of Eighth and Clark streets, wearing a T-shirt and scowling at the summer hubbub. My friend Dave Eaton lives there now and laughs at that story. But what about the house on F Street where a man impregnated his wife’s 12-year-old daughter, with his wife’s full cooperation? Somebody else lives there now. The yard is neat, the dog is friendly, a tricycle is stowed on the porch and the walks are shoveled. I’m not about to go knock on that door and spill those ­particular beans.

But the ghosts know. They’ve watched things change. They’ve seen our cruelty and our kindness. They’ve watched us bicker and then come together when the river floods or a house burns or cancer strikes. They’ve watched schools close and new banks open. Livingston has more wealthy people now and fewer children, and I wonder if the ghosts realize there’s something off-kilter there.

Most of the railroad jobs are gone, but there’s a dozen art galleries. The neighborhood grocery stores closed up ages ago, but we have better food now. A bin of avocados or a jar of kimchi no longer puzzles people, and tuna doesn’t have to come in a can. In many ways, I like my town better now. It’s more open-minded and more generous, I think. We’ve certainly become more cosmopolitan, with creative people from all over the world passing through or planting roots, living out stories that will be somebody else’s ghosts someday.

But I’m glad my own ghosts are still here, the old ones reminding me of people now gone, people who died or chased a dream or maybe just found a job somewhere else.

They’re OK, these ghosts. I’m used to them now. They can walk with me any time.

Scott McMillion is the editor of Montana Quarterly, where a version of this essay originally appeared.

]]>No publisherEssaysMontanaCommunitiesPeople & PlacesNot on homepage2015/02/16 03:10:00 GMT-7ArticleThe Latest: New Mexico fracking ban overturnedhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.3/the-latest-new-mexico-fracking-ban-overturned
A win for industry in the nation’s first county to ban the practice. BACKSTORYThe first U.S. county to ban hydraulic fracturing and other oil and gas development was perhaps the most unlikely: a rural, sparsely populated chunk of northern New Mexico. Mora County soon became a model for communities from Colorado to California seeking to prohibit fracking (“The man behind a New Mexico county’s fracking ban,” HCN, 6/24/14). But after the ordinance passed in April 2013, four landowners (backed by oil and gas interests) and a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell sued.

FOLLOWUPOn Jan. 19, a U.S. District Court struck down Mora County’s ban. It was the first time a federal court has ruled on “local control” of oil and gas development, and the decision represents a win for industry — and a blow to environmentalists. The judge found that the ban’s language deprived oil and gas companies of their corporate rights, violating the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. John Olívas, the former county commissioner behind the ban, says that while it’s “unfortunate corporate rights are so much higher than community rights in the eyes of the court,” the fight for local control is far from over.

]]>No publisherLatestEnergy & IndustryOilNew MexicoCommunities2015/02/16 03:10:00 GMT-7ArticleWilderness as therapisthttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.3/wilderness-as-therapist
A growing number of veterans and researchers are racing to understand nature’s power to heal.One of the environmental movement’s most legendary characters was also a traumatized war vet. You might remember George Washington Hayduke for his inventive, destructive antics, but he was also a man who measured road miles by the number of six-packs it took him to drink while driving and whose mind often wandered back to Vietnam. “What’s more American,” Hayduke wonders in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, “than violence?”

The fictional Hayduke had a real-life model: a former Army medic named Doug Peacock. Peacock served in Vietnam during his 20s, and as he went through the violence of that war, the thing he carried was a map of the Northern Rockies. He brought it out during rare quiet moments and imagined himself in its contours, rolling over the sharp granite creases of the Wind River Mountains or the grassy meadows north of Yellowstone Lake. When he returned from the war, he returned to nature, studying grizzlies for several decades and fighting for their federal protection, as well as for that of other threatened species. These days, the 72-year-old activist and writer has become a new role model, not just for greens, but for a new generation of veterans.

“What they need to do is go out and immerse (themselves) in the wild,” he said recently. “Let it wrap around you. See what it does to you.”

The idea of wilderness as therapy for veterans is nothing new. In recent years, a growing number of such programs are springing up around it. But in order for it to work on the scale that’s needed, its supporters are going to have to get the military behind it. And that’s where the difficulty lies.

There are some 21 million American veterans today, 4 million in the West alone, who have served in places from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. Half of Iraq and Afghanistan vets have received mental health diagnoses including post-traumatic stress, which can lead to high rates of alcohol or drug abuse, domestic violence and suicide. In 2010, an estimated 6,000 vets committed suicide — on average 16 a day, and 20 percent of the U.S. total. More soldiers have died from self-inflicted wounds than service members died in combat between 2002 and 2013.

The federal Department of Veterans Affairs is supposed to help, but the agency seems overwhelmed. Treatment rates have improved in recent years, but 242,000 vets report not receiving treatment within four months of requesting it. The VA predicts it will treat 6.6 million vets in 2015.

A persistent lack of funding and increasingly common and hard-to-treat problems like traumatic brain injury have combined with bureaucratic red tape to breed distrust among veterans about the agency’s effectiveness. A national scandal last year, when it was revealed that the VA had exaggerated how quickly it was treating people, made things even worse. A recent survey showed that almost a third of veterans with PTSD or traumatic brain injury now drop out of treatment, citing lack of progress, and the same number never bother to ask for help.

Meanwhile, a growing number of vets are finding ways to help themselves –– particularly in the wild. A leading proponent of this approach is Stacy Bare, a 36-year-old Iraq War veteran and the director of Sierra Club Military Outdoors, a prominent wilderness program for veterans. At 6-foot-7, broad-boned and with an impossibly deep baritone voice, Bare is an imposing figure, one who is inspiring to many service members finding their way through trauma. A climber, skier and mountaineer, who likes to end his emails with the message “Stay stoked!” Bare is well aware of the benefits of nature.

“We know intuitively that outdoor recreation can provide a quantifiable mental health benefit,” he says. “But for policy and for funders, we have to make sure that we have strong monitoring and -evaluation behind it.”

That’s because, while there are a growing number of one-off partnerships between outdoor organizations and local VA hospitals, the VA as an entire agency is not fully on board with wilderness as therapy. And that’s because Bare and others can’t prove that it works. “Across the board, people haven’t done a good job showing the results,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of nice things for veterans, but what are the things that really work?”

Right now, there’s a wide range of existing wilderness programs for vets: The VA partner Wasatch Adaptive Sports gets them skiing and camping outside Salt Lake; Project Healing Waters takes them fly-fishing around the country; Idaho-based Higher Ground hosts eight-week sports camps for vets and their families; the Army’s own Warrior Adventure Quest teaches “alternatives to aberrant behavior,” such as paint ball, rock climbing and scuba diving. Outward Bound Veterans and Sierra Club Military Outdoors take hundreds of vets outdoors each year.

But just because these kinds of programs appear to be working doesn’t mean that researchers understand how. And until that happens, it will be hard to create a coherent, officially sanctioned program, especially through the VA writ large.

“I think there’s interest, but there is not necessarily a national acceptance of adventure-based experiences within the VA,” says psychologist David Scheinfeld, director of research for Project Rebirth, a nonprofit that develops healing programs for first responders and vets, who recently became a post-doctoral fellow for the VA in Austin, Texas. “The VA needs data showing it’s effective, safe, that it’s worth -supporting.”

Scheinfeld is working to provide that data. Last fall, in partnership with Outward Bound, he studied the psychological impacts of outdoor experiences for veterans. Though not yet peer-reviewed, that study is one of the closest examinations of the value of nature in treating war trauma. Scheinfeld observed how anxiety, sense of purpose and other health indicators changed for 199 vets before, immediately after and one month following an outdoor experience, such as mountaineering or backpacking for a week. The majority of veterans showed improvements, including increased willingness to seek professional help, lower rates of depression and enhanced feelings of social connection, though some of those changes tapered off after a month.

This kind of research could also help assuage critics who say outdoor companies and guides stand to profit from more widespread programs.

“The VA (is) very data-driven,” says Jennifer Romesser, a clinical psychologist at the Salt Lake VA, who helps run veterans outdoor programs. “That’s why this research is so important.”

Stacy Bare climbs Whale’s Tail in Eldorado Canyon State Park, Colorado. His first climbing experience on the Flatirons outside of Boulder, Colorado, in 2008, led the Iraq War veteran to become part of a movement to get other vets into the outdoors.

Chris Kassar

Stacy Bare and a growing number of “stoked” vets know this, so they are working hard to get the VA the data it needs to act. Bare is now helping with a three-year pilot study, bringing together Sierra Club Military Outdoors, Outward Bound, Project Rebirth and Georgetown University.

The study will gather groups of nine to 12 veterans and integrate therapeutic outdoor experiences with more traditional mental health treatment, testing the effects while researching ways to partner with local VA centers. (The first group will spend a week in April rafting Cataract Canyon in Utah with Outward Bound.)

As part of the three-year study, 37-year-old Josh Brandon, who served three tours in the Iraq War, is establishing research hubs in Washington state. Like Bare, Brandon is sold on nature as therapist.

Brandon served as an infantry officer in the Army in his first tour in Iraq — “like the guys on TV, who are dirty, have rifles and are getting into street fights.” As an advisor to Iraqi forces in 2006, he saw civil war and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. By the beginning of his third tour in 2009, he was drinking pretty hard, but by the end of it, he told me, “I came home with ‘death eyes.’ ”

He tried the VA, but at the clinic in Lakewood, Washington, he saw soldiers with amputated limbs and gruesome scars, and “it scared the shit out of me,” he recalled. It also convinced him that other vets needed help even more than he did. He started getting together with Army buddies, doing crash courses with a local mountain guide, and then going out on expeditions, where teamwork and goals created a positive space for recovery. On his first attempt to summit Mount Rainier, he ran into 60 mph winds and rock falls. It was, he says, “awesome.” Somewhere along the way, the death eyes went away.

Brandon says his main goal remains getting vets the help they need. But he’s discovered an interesting fringe benefit: Not only can nature help vets, he says, but they can return the favor –– by helping nature. And a recent survey showed that 75 percent of post-9/11 war vets who live in Western states favor federal protection of public lands. Much like Hayduke, Brandon has become a warrior for the wilderness. And he’s not the only veteran who feels that way, he says: “I call it defending our land a second time.”

San Francisco photographer Michael Light focuses on the Western landscape and its transformation by modern American culture. The third book in a multi-volume series of aerial photographs, Some Dry Space: An Inhabited West, Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain is a beautiful yet harrowing look at urban sprawl and whittled-down desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada.

Light, who is also a pilot, took to the skies in 2010 to study two developments that were temporarily stalled by the real estate decline. Taken during early morning and late afternoon to capture maximum “three-dimensionality,” Light’s photos make space appear vast and surreal. Captivating and vulgar, elegant and raw, these images remind us what it means to live in a constantly changing West.

]]>No publisherBooksPhotosNevadaGrowth & SustainabilityCommunities2015/02/12 02:10:00 GMT-7ArticleFractivists target Denver to build support http://www.hcn.org/articles/fractivists-target-denver-to-build-support
A new campaign launches to stop fracking before it starts in and around Denver. Much of Denver’s 21st-century growth has populated the northeastern section of the city, namely the Green Valley Ranch neighborhood. Affordable homes and a popular library and golf course helped draw 21,000 new people and a diverse mix of white, black and Hispanic families to Green Valley Ranch between 2000 and 2010. Pat Hamill, chief executive of Oakwood Homes, the subdivision’s developer, has called the area “the best-kept secret in Denver.”

There’s another well-kept secret out at Green Valley Ranch: Oakwood Homes held onto many of the mineral rights beneath the houses, and leased them to Anadarko Energy, which in turn sold the rights to ConocoPhillips, both major players in the energy boom and fracking frenzy along Colorado’s Front Range and the oil-rich Niobrara shale. The strategy allows developers to cash in on energy development – despite the potential impacts to homeowners who often figure out the deal only after they move in.

Oil and gas development near homes in Frederick, Colorado, north of Denver (Joshua Zaffos).

While energy pressures have spread around Denver, the city hasn’t seen much drilling within its borders; 76 wells surround the airport and pre-date its construction. Now, a coalition of environmentalists, families, social justice organizations, and restaurants and breweries are launching an effort to avert Mile High City fracking before it happens.

The Don’t Frack Denver coalition is calling on Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and the city council to pass a fracking moratorium to prevent any drilling in outlying eastern communities, including Green Valley Ranch and the historic African-American Montbello neighborhood. And that moratorium is just one prong of the coalition's attack. They're also asking city leaders to weigh in on the Bureau of Land Management’s forthcoming management plan for South Park (the wide-open, rural mountain valley southwest of Denver, not the TV show), which could allow energy leasing on 280,000 acres of grassland.

“It’s significant because Denver gets nearly 40 percent of its drinking water supply from that area,” says Sam Schabacker, of environmental nonprofit Food and Water Watch, “and it’s not a question of if there’s going to be a spill; it’s when.”

Most of South Park’s public lands are already open to leasing, with conditions, says Kyle Sullivan, spokesman for the BLM’s Front Range District Office, but there is no current oil and gas development. The agency is about to start gathering comments for a revised regional management plan. The revision will include a master leasing plan, which is a relatively new approach to reviewing energy development in high-interest regions. In the meantime, a 2014 statewide BLM memo set aside all areas under master leasing plans as off-limits to oil and gasleases.

As far as considering impacts to 1.3 million people’s water supply, Sullivan says, “we’re certainly taking that into consideration, and we’re hoping to get additional public input into how to best manage these conflicting demands.”

Active and inactive gas wells in Northeast Denver. Map from Food and Water Watch.

But Schabacker and other fractivists have low expectations for the task force, since participating industry reps, citizens, and state and local officials must compromise and agree on the final recommendations. And the coalition and its inclusion of diverse social-justice and business groups could represent a major leap forward in building broader opposition to fracking and development near homes.

Padres y Jóvenes Unidos, a Denver-based, Latino social-justice group, focuses primarily on education and health. But organizer Monica Acosta says Padres Unidos got involved with the new campaign because fracking in east Denver would be “an attack on working-class communities of color.”

“In conversations with our membership, we’ve noticed there’s a lack of information about fracking, where it goes on, why we should care, and the disproportionate impacts on communities of color that historically have little political power,” Acosta says. “‘Fracking’ (the word) doesn’t even have a direct translation into Spanish.”

Acosta says her group will be educating and mobilizing members and other Latinos on the issue. That could marshal a significant and up-til-now overlooked voter bloc if a citywide – or statewide – fracking ban hits the ballot. Despite the defeats for the Front Range anti-fracking movement, proponents are looking to New York’s recent statewide fracking ban as precedent for a successful initiative.

“We think it’s important to proactively figure out what is taking place before fracking begins (in Denver),” Schabacker says. “As we’ve seen across the state, once drilling begins, it is nearly impossible to stop.”

Joshua Zaffos is a contributing editor for High Country News. He tweets at @jzaffos.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryCommunitiesColoradoOilNatural GasPollutionPolitics2015/02/11 08:55:00 GMT-7ArticleDeportation reliefhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/deportation-relief
Program could help immigrant families stay in the U.S.

Immigrant families attend the Immigration Relief Education forum at the Los Angeles Convention Center to learn how to prove they have lived in the U.S. for five years or more. Deferred action programs could prevent the deportation of more than 4 million families in the U.S.

Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo

Over 4 million unauthorized immigrants live in the West. If the Obama administration and Congress succeed in passing immigration reform, many could be eligible for deportation relief. Nationwide, 46 percent of unauthorized immigrants qualify for deferred action programs under federal guidelines. But in many Western states, that number is higher: In Utah, it’s 54 percent; in Idaho, 64. Across the 11 Western states, over 2 million people could qualify. A high proportion of immigrants in the region come from Mexico (in Colorado, 81 percent), says Randy Capps, an immigration expert at the Migration Policy Institute. These families are long established and settled, increasing the odds that they’ll be eligible. But as the chart below shows, the West’s unauthorized immigrant populations are also widely diverse, in both countries of origin and in occupations. Increasingly, they have families, jobs and, now, roots in the region.

Click on chart to view larger

]]>No publisherImmigrationSocial JusticeCommunitiesPeople & PlacesPolitics2015/02/02 04:05:00 GMT-7Article'I Am Alaskan'http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/alaskan-identity-through-portraits
The surprising diversity of the 49th state, through Brian Adams’ lens. People have always captivated Alaskan photographer Brian Adams, and he focuses on the human element in his work, even when photographing landscapes. His book, I Am Alaskan, is a celebration of Alaska’s diverse human landscape as well as a personal exploration of his own identity.

“Most people think of Alaska as either a white man with a beard that is pioneering a mountain, or a Native man with a fur ruff around his face,” he says. “Those people are here, and they’re definitely beautiful to look at, but I also wanted to showcase the diversity in Alaska.”

His colorful portraits show people on the snowy tundra in Barrow, Alaska, as well as on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska, and inside their own homes. Most of the subjects look directly into Adams’ lens. Each roll on his Hasselblad film camera produces only 12 shots, so he cannot afford to be careless in his shooting; every picture he takes is thoughtfully and deliberately calculated.

Adams has lived in Anchorage, Alaska, for most of his life, but he has also visited many rural villages on assignment for clients such as the Alaska Native Medical Center and Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. He says that his own Iñupiat heritage has made it easier for him to capture intimate scenes of Native people. “I could go to any village on the northwest area, and we’re all connected somehow,” he says. “The first thing they ask me is, ‘Who are your grandparents?’ and, depending on their age, they probably know or have some kind of story that goes along with who our families are.”

Alaska is still a young state — just over 50 years old. It’s often romanticized, but Adams gives a unique and raw view of life in the Far North. “What I want people to see in the book is that we are a very welcoming, fun, friendly, diverse state,” he says. “It’s a place I’m very proud to show people.”

]]>No publisherPhotosMultimediaArtPhoto GalleryAlaskaPeople & PlacesCommunitiesTribes2015/02/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticlePlan for a burn at Rocky Flats stirs lingering fearshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/nuclear-fallout-for-proposed-burn
More from the nuclear fallout department.It takes a little more than 24,000 years for plutonium-239 to lose half of its radioactive energy. People’s memories don’t last as long, but can have their own burning energy when it comes to risks from nuclear-weapons plants.

Plans for a prescribed fire this spring in a corner of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge – formerly the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant – have run into resistance from activists, former workers and new homeowners concerned about the health effects of burning potentially contaminated grasslands. But those worries are outdated and oversized, according to state and federal government managers, and ignore natural wildfire risks that could pose more severe problems.

Rocky Flats nuclear weapons site prior to cleanup, July 1995 (Photo via U.S. Department of Energy)

Located between Denver and Boulder, the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant produced plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs beginning in 1952. An FBI raid in 1989 halted operations after finding evidence of illegal radioactive waste dumping, burning and storage across the 6,200-acre site.

Since then, government managers and contractors have spent $7.5 billion cleaning up Rocky Flats: razing buildings, removing radioactive materials and soils, and restoring other areas. The open and rolling landscape now encompasses a National Wildlife Refuge; it remains off-limits to people, and the hottest spots are still monitored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

As part of efforts to manage the lands today, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans for a prescribed burn on 701 acres in the southwest corner of the site last fall. The planned burn will help thin out invasive weeds and overgrown vegetation – before a natural wildfire occurs and scorches the area more severely.

“If we have a wildfire, it will be devastating,” says David Lucas, Fish and Wildlife refuge manager. Erosion caused by a wildfire could move soil and materials from more contaminated areas and release airborne radiation.

Speaking to the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council, a panel of local government and other representatives, and a public audience on Jan. 26, Lucas said the construction of a major new housing and shopping development, Candelas, along the Flats’ southern boundary has “induced” the burn plans. He added that the planned burn area has been tested and contamination is no higher than “background levels” found elsewhere. Managers and technicians who will carry out the work will take no extra precautions compared with other prescribed burns. The state of Colorado approved a smoke permit for the project.

But all that has done little to alleviate scrutiny and fears of locals. Long-time activists and former plant workers say the burn plans are reckless and the action could release plutonium locked in the soil and vegetation. Alternatives, such as using goats to graze overgrown areas (and then probably killing the potentially radioactive livestock), should have gotten more consideration, they say. Opponents also argue that a test burn in 2000 released much higher levels of airborne radiation and toxic smoke than the government has acknowledged.

“Is it appropriate to have a burn on a radionuclide-contaminated site?” asks Mickey Harlow, a retired water-quality analyst for the nearby town of Westminster. That’s a national question for former nuclear sites across the West that are now being managed as wildlife areas and being surrounded by new development. “We have to err on the side of safety,” says Harlow, who along with others are meeting with attorneys to consider actions to prevent the burn.

Following the past coverups and negligence at Rocky Flats – and considering the ongoing health problems of former workers – the enduring skepticism of government actions at Rocky Flats is no surprise. Harlow and many others contend the site’s toxic legacy and the extent of contamination remains unknown or underestimated.

In response to the heightened suspicions of residents, the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council has asked Fish and Wildlife to reconsider its plans, scheduled for the spring when conditions permit. But David Abelson, himself an energy-policy consultant for local governments, emphasizes that the council’s opposition is rooted in citizens’ concerns, not any specific health risks.

Containing radiation – and people’s fears – is tricky business. Lucas, the refuge manager, understands the worries, but he says that while Fish and Wildlife also recognizes that prescribed fire wouldn’t be appropriate across all of Rocky Flats, residents should understand that radioactive contamination isn’t a ubiquitous threat – and choosing not to manage the expansive site brings its own dangerous consequences, including a possible wildfire spreading to more contaminated areas.

“We have to get past that,” Lucas says. “We know the Flats will burn.”

Joshua Zaffos is an HCN contributing editor. He tweets at @jzaffos. Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that David Abelson is a Department of Energy contractor, which is incorrect. The story has been corrected.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesNuclear EnergyColoradoEnergy & Industry2015/01/31 05:00:00 GMT-7ArticleUtah burn ban ignites outrage over ‘basic freedoms’http://www.hcn.org/articles/utah-burn-ban-ignites-outrage-over-basic-freedoms
The right to burn versus the right to breathe.Over 500 people showed up at the historic Cache County courthouse in Logan, Utah, Jan. 21 for a public hearing organized by the state’s Division of Air Quality (DAQ). They tried to squeeze in to a courtroom with a capacity of 160. A line formed out the courtroom doors, down the hallway, outside, and into a parking lot, where on a flatbed truck, wood-burning stoves sat on display, a warm orange glow flickering through their glass doors. This was as good a spot as any for residents to warm up while waiting for their turn to give comments on a proposed seasonal wood burning ban in the county.

The ban would prohibit the use of solid fuel burning devices for over four months every winter in seven northern Utah counties. The Utah DAQ is accepting comments through Feb. 9 and plans to make a decision or revise the rule before the beginning of the 2015/2016 winter inversion season.

Salt Lake City suffers smoggy conditions, particularly under a winter inversion layer, which traps particulates close to the ground. Courtesy Flickr user mateoutah.

The folks who brought the stoves to the tailgate were part of a recently formed coalition called “Utahns for Responsible Burning.” With backing from the fireplace industry, they want to exempt Environmental Protection Agency-certified, low-emissions stoves from the proposed ban. They see this exemption as a “common-sense solution” that will result in cleaner air and “preserve basic freedoms.”

Utahns for Responsible Burning are not an unruly bunch, but it’s this second focus of their mission -- to preserve basic freedoms -- that attracted the large crowd of concerned citizens to the meeting. They created a slick website with pre-written comments for the DAQ that users could submit with one click and made sure the word got out about the seven public hearings. “This is not about wood burning,” said one resident going on the record to oppose the ban. “This is about rights.”

If it passes as proposed this would be the strictest wood burning ban in the nation. To combat exceptionally high levels of particle pollution that form during winter inversions, Utah Governor Gary Herbert proposed the ban and tasked the DAQ with probing public opinion. Several northern Utah counties are out of compliance with federal air quality standards. Study after study has linked these pollution episodes to serious health problems, including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, stroke and early death.

The Utah Division of Air Quality already bans wood burning on so-called “red-air days,” when pollution levels exceed federal standards, but DAQ Director Bryce Bird says they still find wood smoke particles on their detection filters on these days, so there is clearly a problem with enforcement. An all-out ban seems a simple solution to curb these emissions.

Bird has already worked to assure the public, via a local call-in radio show, saying the DAQ would be reviewing each and every comment. His personal opinion is that it’s unlikely that the state will finalize the proposed rule as-is after considering the public feedback. “The result will be rule-making action informed by public opinion,” he said. But it’s hard to imagine a satisfying rule informed by the opinions of an angry mob, the fireplace industry, clean air activists, and citizens who value their self-reliance above all else.

At the Cache County hearing, only two residents voiced their support for the ban. One, an older woman with lung cancer, was booed by the crowd when she said that the ban would ease some of the suffering of her disease. A man who said his wife’s and son’s asthma had worsened since moving to Logan was jeered and told to get rid of his car and “ride a horse” or and move his family out of the valley.

There will be public hearings in each of the seven affected counties during the 40-day comment period. Five of the seven have already taken place. They’ve been like the Cache County hearing -- with overwhelming opposition and anti-government rhetoric. Many residents believe that the decision to ban wood burning has already been made without regard to their opinions. “We already know you’re going to implement the ban,” said one Cache County resident, “so you should know right now that we’re not going to comply.”

Jennifer Pemberton reports on community and the environment for Utah Public Radio. She writes about the West from her home in Logan, Utah.

I think of myself as the kind of guy who writes letters to the editor with a lot of exclamation points and question marks coupled with inappropriate capital letters. As a cartoonist, I am a sort of ink-stained, self-ordained, sonuvabitch preacher with a drawing board as a pulpit. I just stick my tongue out at elected officials or anybody at all, and I hope to make people think and maybe smile.

I do not believe in killing, or in dying, for a cause or an idea. I leave that to adolescents. I do believe in living for a cause. This is the first thing I want to say about the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, a story of freedom of expression attacked by religious absolutists.

I do not think of myself as heroic or even artistic. Cartoons are the most anti-intellectual feature of modern journalism, usually nothing more than a wisecrack, reducing a complex problem to a one-liner. They are designed to move the blood, not the mind.

My cartoon colleagues and I are “wise guys”: Nobody and nothing is considered sacred, and it doesn't bother us at all who we ridicule or offend. I have occasionally worried about being sued, but I have never worried about getting killed for what I do.

The certainty that your religion is the only right one, and it does not matter which religion -- Judaism, Christianity or Islam -- leaves no room for jokes or a sense of humor, and I have thought for a long time that that is what is wrong with religion.

Mohammad was just a man who received a message from God to relay to others. He never said he was God. He's not that special; a lot of people get messages from God. That's the second thing I want to say to the Charlie Hebdo killers.

That said, one of the few ways in dealing with the appalling explosions of hatred and mass violence that disgrace our world is humor. Humor and comedy allow us to step back from the tragedies of the world, get some psychic distance from it, and gain at least a sense of control. If you can laugh at it, it can no longer be so daunting. Humor can lift life's messes, no matter how heavy they seem, push them around a bit, flatten them and blast them into clumps and atoms. Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

As for me, I would go crazy if I treated the world seriously. I draw cartoons to stay sane, although some friends have claimed that if I got too sane, I'd be out of a job. I like to think that doing a cartoon is my tolerant smile at the mutability of things and the swarm of humanity passing my door. I also know it is the best way to handle the bad stuff. Cartoons are one way to say important things that regular writers aren't saying in a regular way -- or, if they are, it is so regular and balanced that nobody bothers to read it.

Humor allows you to roll with the punches of life's stupidity rather than be knocked down by them. You may not be able to change what goes on around you, but you can react to it with humor, and in an uncertain world, there's a certain comfort in that.

Cartoonists operate in a two-level reality: The “real” world and the world “as if.” In the “real” world, apathy, greed, anger and fear run things along with a sprinkling here and there of faith, hope and love. In the world “as if,” people are tolerant, you are judged by the content of your mind, bureaucracies are responsive to people, and laws are made for the benefit of others -- all that good stuff.

Cartoons get their tension from that dichotomy, by mocking things as they are, pointing out the ridiculous, hoping to elicit an “ah, ha!” moment. Optimists at heart, cartoonists seem to believe that if we can get your attention with a wisecrack or jibe that’s heard over the din of advertising and other claims to your attention, you will care and maybe, just maybe, change the way things work.

The third thing I want to say to the Charlie Hebdo killers is that they did not succeed at their goal. They failed. As Mary Pettibone Poole once said, “He who laughs, lasts.”

Rob Pudim is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). He draws cartoons in Longmont, Colorado, for many publications in the West.

]]>No publisherWriters on the RangeCommunities2015/01/20 09:50:00 GMT-7ArticleIs altitude causing suicide in the West?http://www.hcn.org/articles/is-altitude-causing-suicide-in-the-west
Researchers find that high elevations may affect our emotions in both good and bad waysThe West’s mountain towns, from Jackson to Taos, Silverton to Park City, Truckee to Ketchum, tend to float to the top of what I’ll call Listicles of Happiness: Those inane rankings of the “best towns” in the nation, whether it’s the best small towns, the best ski towns or, a recent favorite to hate, “20 Colorado Mountain Towns That Are Paradise in Winter,” the writers of which have some fetish for stoplights, or the lack thereof. Judging from these lists, we mountain townies are a joyous bunch, working high-paying jobs that not only allow us to follow our passion, but also to go fly fishing on our lunch break, mountain bike after that (without stoplights to slow us down!), and then, fueled by a runner’s high, party long into the night.

But there’s another set of lists, too, that aren’t published by the usual magazines or websites, but on which those very same mountain towns and states tend to rank highly: The Lists of Misery. Western states are among the national leaders in alcohol abuse and depression rates, and rank low for mental health. A few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control — the usual compilers of the Lists of Misery — put out a report on alcohol-related poisoning fatalities. The Interior West had the highest rates, by far. Then there’s the ultimate List of Misery, suicide rates, which the Interior West has long topped, earning the Rocky Mountain states the morbid moniker of The Suicide Belt.

Suicide rates are far higher in the Interior West than in the rest of the nation.

The root causes of this mountain misery have remained a mystery. Maybe we kill ourselves at a higher rate because we have so many guns at our disposal, and maybe we reach that extreme of misery because we are physically and emotionally isolated: We not only live further apart from one another, but our independent Western spirit prevents us from seeking help and support. Maybe the notion of driving over mountain passes for mental health care is too daunting.

But a group of researchers think they may have found the reason the mountain states top not only the Lists of Misery, but maybe also the Listicles of Happiness: high altitude. Two studies, each by an overlapping group of scientists looking into the matter, were published back in 2010 and 2011. The findings didn’t get a lot of play at the time. But after CDC released its latest data, for 2012, showing that the suicide rate has been increasing nationwide, particularly in Western states like Utah and Colorado, and after an article on the altitude findings was published at Science.Mic in November, the theory attracted more attention.

In the paper “Positive Association between Altitude and Suicide in 2584 U.S. Counties” published in 2011 in High Altitude Medicine and Biology, the authors looked at every county in the U.S., and found a strong positive correlation between the average altitude of the county and the suicide rate. Counties that lie below 2,000 feet above sea level had an overall suicide rate that was about half that of counties lying between 4,000 and 5,000 feet in altitude. Counties above 9,000 feet had the highest suicide rate. And so on. This in spite of the fact that high altitude counties generally have a lower mortality rate from all other causes. The authors note:

Prior reports of increased suicides in the U.S. Mountain Region have prompted speculation that the excess is owing to greater access to firearms, increased isolation, or reduced income. Even after controlling for these variables in our analysis, the positive correlation between altitude and suicide still exists, which suggests that the increased suicide rate in the regions with greatest altitude, such as the Mountain Region, may be owing to, at least in part, its altitude per se.

How could altitude lead someone to end their own life? Possibly through hypoxia, or lack of adequate oxygen to the brain, the phenomenon that causes us to get dizzy, or drunk faster, at high altitude. “Altitude is a well-known cause of hypoxia,” the authors say, “and the greater the elevation, the greater the hypoxia. Chronic hypoxia also is thought to increase mood disturbances, especially in patients with emotional instability.” The authors go on to admit that hypoxia’s effect on mood is complex, and more study is needed.

One of the researchers, at least, has continued that study, and thinks he’s closer to solving the mystery. In the Science.Mic article, writer Theresa Fisher spoke with Utah neuroscientist Perry Renshaw about his findings. Renshaw told her that he believes altitude messes with our bodies’ levels of dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that regulate our sense of happiness. Hypoxia, he says, causes serotonin to go down in our brains (which usually results in depression) and dopamine to increase (which usually creates a sense of euphoria, e.g. “runner’s high”).

Whether this conflicting combination of effects makes us happy or makes us sad depends on the makeup of our brains. Folks with a history of depression are more likely to get more depressed if they move to the mountains, as are women, according to the Science.Mic article. And people who are naturally happy are likely to get downright ecstatic at higher altitudes. And that would explain how so many mountain towns can top both the Listicles of Happiness and the Lists of Misery.

When I first caught wind of the theory a few months ago, it seemed absurd. I’ve lived all but one year of my life between 5,000 and 9,300 feet. Looking back at those times — as well as the year I spent at sea level — I don’t see any correlations between my mental health and the altitude at which I was living. Sure, my sanity often wore a little thin while living in Silverton, Colorado, at 9,300 feet, but then there were many other factors aside from altitude to consider: A tiny populace, psychotic politics, a treacherous drive to the nearest movie theatre and, yeah, I was running the town newspaper, a sure road to mental illness.

Having said all of that, suicide has been a shockingly common cause of death in Silverton since the heydays of mining, and many of its current residents — the ones who aren’t fighting over at Town Hall — can tend to get wrapped up in a sort of hypoxic euphoria. I always thought it was the scenery. Perhaps it’s the altitude.